AI detectors are creating a new era of distrust

The article traces how plagiarism-checking tools evolved into AI detectors after ChatGPT, promising to identify machine-written text but often producing uncertain results. Educators, editors, and institutions are increasingly relying on these systems despite false positives that can unfairly implicate students and writers.

The rise of AI detection reflects a broader trust crisis around authorship as generative tools become harder to distinguish from human writing. Rather than solving the problem, unreliable detectors may push schools and workplaces toward new norms around transparency, process documentation, and acceptable AI use.